There’s a moment in Guy Ritchie’s Fountain of Youth when treasure hunter Luke Purdue (John Krasinski, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan) steals a Rembrandt painting from a gallery curated by his sister, Charlotte (Natalie Portman, Lady in the Lake; May December; Thor), which subsequently turns out to be a duplicate. That’s this movie, which debuted straight to streaming on Apple TV+, in microcosm – a blockbuster in the mould of Indiana Jones and National Treasure that quickly reveals itself to be more akin to The Mummy Returns, albeit with less personality.
I’m surprised and disappointed to say that about a Guy Ritchie movie. You’d think the director of Snatch would be able to put one of these things together with a bit of verve, but somewhere along the way his signature style was chewed up in the machinery of AAA studio filmmaking, and the resultant slop feels more like an AI rewrite of a potentially more daring original version. Perhaps the script from James Vanderbilt, whose previous writing credits include those Murder Mystery movies on Netflix, the last two Scream movies, and Independence Day: Resurgence, should have been a bit of a clue. Luke Purdue would have probably spotted that.
Or would he? The Purdue character is a classic American adventurer archetype in that he cracks wise to dangerous villains and his allies alike and occasionally stops to monologue about history and mythology while clicking through a PowerPoint presentation, but one never really gets the sense he knows what he’s doing. We meet him being chased by gangsters after making a big show of stealing a painting, and that group is able to track him down for at least half of the movie, along with a couple of other competing groups, all of whom seem to know exactly where he is at all times.
Purdue’s also completely dependent on his team, which includes Murph (Laz Alonso, The Boys) and Deb (Carmen Ejogo, The Penguin; I’m a Virgo; It Comes at Night), and eventually his sister, an art history boffin who’s currently going through a messy divorce and has to drag her musical prodigy son Thomas (Benjamin Chivers, The Devil’s Hour) around the globe with them. If you’re wondering whether the quest to find the titular Fountain of Youth, which ranges from Bangkok to London, Vienna, and eventually Cairo, will ultimately be dependent on the musical aptitude of the kid who’s forced to be present for all the puzzle-solving scenes, you can give yourself a big pat on the back for having definitely seen a movie like this before.
John Krasinski, Domhnall Gleeson and Natalie Portman in Fountain of Youth | Image via Apple TV+
Purdue’s latest efforts are being bankrolled by billionaire Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson, The Patient), who’s dying of liver cancer and thus is willing to exhaust all of his resources into prolonging his own life, but it’s easier said than done. The latest representative in a long line of historical guardians, Esme (played with great charisma by a disappointingly underserved Eiza González, late of 3 Body Problem and Ritchie’s better movie The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare), will stop at nothing to prevent Purdue from finding the Fountain, and an Interpol agent, Inspector Jamal Abbas (Arian Moayed, Succession; Inventing Anna), keeps sticking his nose in to arrest Purdue for the string of high-profile art thefts he has left in his wake.
You can see all of the basic genre fixtures are present and correct in Fountain of Youth, but the pieces are so artlessly assembled that it’s difficult to care. The globetrotting adventure feels like a rote join-the-dots puzzle, with every revelation being unveiled too easily, and a baffling lack of gravitas afforded to supposedly big-deal developments. Purdue seems like he couldn’t care less and isn’t convincing as a morally compromised glory-chasing treasure hunter. Charlotte fares a little better by seeming genuinely in awe of the history and rightfully annoyed that her brother keeps risking her career and her life for his own ambition, but her arc boils down to repeatedly deciding enough is enough and then coming back anyway because there wouldn’t be a movie here if she didn’t.
Supporting players fare even worse, with González’s inscrutable character – answerable to Stanley Tucci, who shows up for like two brief scenes – completely undeveloped, undermining later turns when we’re supposed to keep track of whose side she’s on, and Domhnall Gleeson might as well not be there until the point in the script when it’s decided his character is going to matter beyond just being an endless supply of private jets and stern-looking security teams. None of it really takes.
The only time Fountain of Youth comes alive is when Ritchie gets his hands on an action sequence, and there are a few of those that have some energy and formal creativity, aided by the location shooting and practical stunt work. But it scarcely feels like enough in a movie so tiredly imitative of so many other, much better movies. Everyone involved deserves – and is capable of – a lot better.